An Ordinary Day (4 page)

‘That’s fine, I’m proud of you. But I bet there are a hundred others probably worse than him out there waiting to take his place.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. I just worry when you’re stressed.’

‘I work best under pressure.’

Stephanie kissed Durant on his unshaven cheek and then wiped the lipstick impression off. ‘We’ll plan everything and fit baby into the plan.’

Durant shook his head slowly. ‘The baby isn’t a project, not something that has to be fitted into a plan. We’ve tried so long … I want the birth to be special.’

‘Kevin, you know me. I like to be in control of things. This isn’t a bad thing. I’ll see you tonight.’

Durant glanced at the clock. He was going to be late for work and his headache had reached an intolerable level.

The
NIA
’s provincial office is located in a quiet business park on the outskirts of central Durban. There is nothing formidable or sinister about the building – it looks like one of the many other businesses in an area where executives and workers go about their daily work, unaware of the business of their neighbours. The building is functional, as most government buildings are, and budgetary constraints have clearly limited the final decorating touches which would have made the offices look more corporate. Perhaps the idea was that intelligence officers shouldn’t be lounging in the office but be out in the field, where the information was.

Durant stepped out of the lift on the sixth floor and waved at the security officers as he clipped on his identification badge and entered the secure area.

‘You’re late!’ Masondo’s deep voice echoed up the corridor.

‘Sorry, chief,’ Durant said, trying to focus on the bear-like man in front of him. ‘I had one hell of a night and an even worse morning.’

‘In my office.’

Alfred Masondo, the chief of operations, had bold light-brown eyes, a shaven head, and a strong, good-looking face. Impeccably dressed in a dark suit, he looked more like a
TV
presenter than an intelligence officer. His metamorphosis from bush fighter in the liberation movement’s Umkhonto We Sizwe to intelligence chief in the civilian intelligence agency was nothing short of mind-boggling.

Years earlier, Durant had himself been a soldier, conscripted into the South African Defence Force like thousands of other white South Africans to fight a war they didn’t really understand. They were told socialist revolutionaries in a type of black army, backed by the Russians and Cubans, armed with
AK
-47s and limpet mines, were poised on South Africa’s borders, ready to march into the cities of South Africa and kill all the whites. The military lecturers had drummed this into him during basic training, where the indoctrination was as arduous as the physical training. Hindsight only told him it was indoctrination. At the time, he clung to the lecturer’s words with a naïve terror, which drove him to offer little resistance to the physically and mentally tortuous training programme. Durant remembers arriving at the military base only a few weeks after leaving high school and being thrust into a confusing and complicated world which suddenly appeared very different from the sheltered one from which he had come.

He’d grown up in a ‘grey’ area in Rondebosch East in Cape Town, where apartheid never really worked because children, coloured and white, played together in the streets, built tree houses together in the bush lands, and made box carts which they took turns to push. ‘Separateness’ might have worked as an idea on the statute books, but it didn’t work on the streets where the children played. The apartheid designers should have known that children who want to play cannot be separated. Durant remembers how the children, with a childish recklessness born from boredom, had set fire to the surrounding bush every Friday afternoon then watched transfixed as the firemen doused the fires. To his young friends this was perhaps a childish first strike at authority, and Durant, as an accomplice, was an unwitting participant in the struggle. At the time, though, he saw the firemen as heroes, symbols of authority protecting him from the flames.

When Durant, as a boy of ten, fell off his bike in Kromboom Road, it was a young coloured boy called Neil Ackers who had carried him to his parents’ house with his broken arm wrapped up in a makeshift newspaper sling. As a child, Durant never really understood why he and his friends went to different schools and why they weren’t allowed to go to the beach with him, but he remembers that they accepted each other as friends, and the colour of their skins was never considered an issue worthy of discussion. When Durant’s family moved to a more affluent neighbourhood, and he lost contact with his childhood friends, he spent less and less time with people of colour. His high-school teachers started painting frightening scenarios of communist-inspired revolutions and the slaughter of whites at the hands of the majority black population. This unlikely scenario became a real fear, made worse by the occasional bomb blast in the city centre or other manifestations of the
ANC
’s struggle against the nationalist government.

In 1983, when Durant was conscripted to the army as a medic, he was relieved, but during training he found out that being an Emergency Operational Care Orderly meant more than bandaging up soldiers’ injuries in some field hospital. A medic was a soldier like all the others, except he also carried an extra fifty-kilogram pack on his back filled with medical gear. Medics were only sent where they were needed: where soldiers were being wounded. And soldiers weren’t being wounded at the base camps or in the back lines.

A few months later, deep in the bush of southern Angola, with the extra weight of the medical bag, focusing on treating the wounded rather than firing his weapon, Durant was the most vulnerable member of the squad. During those months he had experienced a fear he had never felt since and never wanted to feel again. Even worse than dying, he feared having to kill.

Durant was more exposed to death than any of the other soldiers. He touched the victims, felt their warm blood on his hands and heard their last, desperate prayers. For a medic, the war was too intimate. Apart from tending to his own comrades, he also had to declare the number of enemy deaths. This entailed checking the deceased combatant’s vital signs, something he had always done mechanically and with less emotional attachment than for his own comrades.

This changed one day in late 1983 when the sadf launched its third major invasion into Angola called Operation Askari. This involved more than 10 000 troops and was ostensibly aimed at
SWAPO
bases in Angola, but it was also timed to support a push northwards against Angola’s
MPLA
government by drawing
FAPLA
troops to the south.

Durant was deployed with a small team of reconnaissance-unit soldiers who had lost their medic in an earlier skirmish and needed a replacement. In true army style, Durant was ‘volunteered’. The unit received orders to push north about fifteen kilometres to an area which aerial reconnaissance had identified as hostile. Buccaneer jets had since bombed a house which they believed to be an
MPLA
barracks, and the unit was ordered to gather intelligence from the ruins and capture prisoners who may have survived. It took the men two hours to reach the area, and as the unit got within twenty metres of the still-smouldering house, gunshots rang out. The soldiers threw themselves to the ground. The unit quickly sheltered behind a broken-down wall in thick bush. The lieutenant ordered Durant to hold the position until the house had been cleared. The other eight men disappeared into the bush while Durant crouched down low and waited. He heard more gunshots and began moving along the crumbling wall to find better cover. Stumbling along, trying to keep his rifle pointed in the general direction of the gunfire, he reached a clump of thick bushes. As he moved around them, he fell over a heavy sack hidden in the bushes. He hit the ground awkwardly, dragged down by the weight of his pack, and lost hold of his rifle which landed a couple of metres away.

The sack was the body of a man lying in the thicket, caked in mud and blood. His uniform was unfamiliar, and Durant knew that this was an enemy soldier. The fire fight continued in the distance, with the occasional staccato burst of gunfire, shouts and grenade blasts. Durant rolled over, released his medical pack and retrieved his rifle. He rolled the man over. The man’s face was a mask, almost completely obscured by caked mud mixed with dry blood and dirt, but he opened his eyes. Durant fell back in fear, letting the man roll back over again, face-down in the dirt. Perhaps he had imagined it. Was it just a postmortem reaction? Durant put two shaking fingers on the man’s neck to feel for his carotid pulse. It was faint, but unmistakably there.

After scanning for enemy combatants, Durant pulled his medical bag closer. The blood on the man’s torso was coming from a wound in his thigh. The man’s hand was clamped tightly over the wound but it couldn’t staunch the bleeding. Durant lifted the man’s head and laid it sideways to enable him to breathe easier. After failing to prise the man’s hand off the wound, Durant applied a trauma dressing around the man’s hand and tied it tightly in place. Durant then carefully inserted a needle into the man’s arm and attached a Ringer’s lactate drip for fluid replacement. It was probably the best nutrition his body had seen for a while. Durant checked for other wounds, made sure the line was flowing correctly, and then pondered his next move.

The fire fight seemed to have slowed down and some of the gunshots sounded as if they were receding into the distance. Durant silently took the combatant’s blood pressure and wrote his vital signs on a piece of tape, which he stuck to the man’s arm. Sweat poured down Durant’s face as he examined the injured man. Under his jacket, he wore a red
T
-shirt with the Coca-Cola logo and the words ‘Coke Adds Life’ written in white. Durant managed a faint smile. The man was well built and clearly in good physical shape. His eyes met Durant’s momentarily, and Durant looked away. This man would kill him, given half a chance. When the man closed his eyes again, Durant studied his face. He expected a cold and expressionless face, the face of the enemy. But it was a kind face; the face of a man wise beyond his years, an elder, a soldier who commanded the respect of his men.

‘You can’t win,’ the man said quietly, in a deep, commanding voice.

‘Shut up,’ Durant said instinctively, shocked at his own brutal response.

‘It’s a people’s war,’ the soldier said, ‘You can’t fight the people forever.’

Durant wished his team would return, as they would know how to deal with this situation. He was just a medic. His patients were to be incoherent and screaming in pain and he was to simply apply medical protocols to keep the patient alive. The man was dying, bleeding out. He should have been praying, asking Durant to tell his wife he loved her, confessing his sins. Instead, he was using his last bit of strength to deliver a political speech.

‘I’m not a politician – I follow orders,’ Durant said, gently squeezing the plasmalyte bag to speed up the fluid flow into the patient’s veins.

‘Don’t you want peace? Don’t you want the killing to stop?’

‘You’re killing us. We’re protecting ourselves.’ As he said the words, Durant knew he had committed the cardinal sin of engaging in a conversation with the enemy.

‘We’re both soldiers. You know how much we want peace?’

‘It’s an elusive thing.’

‘Why are you here?’ the man asked, grimacing in pain and struggling for breath.

‘I fix people. I stop living people from becoming dead people. That’s the only reason I’m here. I’m not fighting this war, others are.’

‘You’re in the fight, my friend.’

‘I’m fighting to keep people alive so they can go home to their families. I thought I could make a difference here.’

‘This is a battlefield; you can’t make a difference here.’ His eyes screwed up in pain. It was hard for him to talk. ‘The difference, my friend … must come in your mind and in your heart.’

Durant put his stethoscope back into his ears and took the man’s blood pressure again. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk to you, I just want to do my job, so I can go home.’

‘I also have a home in South Africa. I’m here so that one day I can go home and live in peace. I don’t want to be in this place any more than you do.’

Durant was surprised the man was a South African. Both South Africans, fighting each other. ‘Ja, it’s crazy, isn’t it?’

‘If you want to make a difference, then you’re part of the struggle – the struggle’s all about making things different, making things better.’

‘Our struggles are different,’ Durant said. But he was unconvinced.

The sound of running feet drew nearer, and Durant picked up his
R
4 rifle and aimed it in the direction of the sound. He lowered it when he recognised the familiar battledress of his team. They were wide-eyed and breathless. One was shouting uncontrollably and another two were carrying a fallen comrade. The radioman could be heard calling for a medevac and Durant began repacking his medical bag.

The lieutenant ran over. ‘Get here, Durant! We’ve taken fire.’ As the lieutenant turned back to his men, he spotted the wounded man and cursed. ‘Did you shoot the bastard?’ he asked Durant.

‘It’s a shrapnel wound from the jets,’ Durant said anxiously. The lieutenant barked an order and two soldiers came running over.

‘You know who this is?’ he asked, his face centimetres from Durant’s.

‘
FAPLA
? I don’t know. I can tell you what his injuries are, though.’

‘This is a freaking commissar, Durant. Did you search him?’

‘He needed treatment, Lieutenant, otherwise he wasn’t going to make it. He still might not make it.’

The lieutenant and one of the other men unceremoniously rolled the combatant over and began searching him.

‘Can you see there’s a drip in his arm?’ Durant said, surprised at the force in his voice.

‘Commissars carry side arms, Durant. We still have a situation here. Leave this to us. Go treat my men.’